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CarlShulman comments on A (small) critique of total utilitarianism - Less Wrong
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Hedonism doesn't specify what sorts of brain states and physical objects have how much pleasure. There are a bewildering variety of choices to be made in cashing out a rule to classify which systems are how "happy." Just to get started, how much pleasure is there when a computer running simulations of happy human brains is sliced in the ways discussed in this paper?
But aren't those empirical difficulties, not fundamental ones? Don't you think there's a fact of the matter that will be discovered if we keep gaining more and more knowledge? Empirical problems can't bring down an ethical theory, but if you can show that there exists a fundamental weighting problem, then that would be valid criticism.
What sort of empirical fact would you discover that would resolve that? A detector for happiness radiation? The scenario in that paper is pretty well specified.